Volunteers from the Lower Colorado River Authority work to clean picnic tables in Brushy Creek Park on Friday.[/caption]

Hundreds of volunteers made a move toward helping local communities in Cedar Park and other Texas cities during LCRA Step Forward Day on Friday.

Employees with the Lower Colorado River Authority went out and cleaned local communities as part of its third annual community service project. LCRA Chief of Staff Clint Harp said the goal of the day was for employees to give back to the company’s service area.

“We serve a lot of different communities on a day-to-day basis through providing water, power and community services. We started Steps Forward Day because we wanted to find a way to serve our customer cities by helping with community projects that might otherwise go undone,” he said. “The towns we serve are really special to Texas, and we wanted to help them with projects they might not have time or staffing with their day-to-day schedules.”

In Cedar Park, teams were dispatched to clean equipment at Elizabeth Milburn, Brushy Creek Lake, Brushy Creek Sports and Veterans Memorial parks. Others were armed with paint to cover graffiti throughout the city.

“We hope community members enjoy the projects we work on, but more than that we want them to know how much we appreciate them being our customers. At its heart, this is a day for us to give back and say, ‘thank you,’” Harp said.

Other projects included clean-up of the park and trail at Lake Pflugerville, replacing bleachers at the Little League baseball fields in Manor and planting native grass seed and removing plants at the Texas Slaughter Creek Trail in Austin. In total, teams visited 35 communities throughout the state, and LCRA provided the labor and many of the materials for each project.

“We talked with our customer cities and asked, ‘What do you need? What can we do to help?’ and they picked the projects they wanted most,” Harp said. “We then looked to see if we could make them happen. They know their communities better than we do and they know what needs to be addressed.”